No Data Corruption & Data Integrity

The process of files getting corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect anything. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

You won't experience any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server packages as the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all of your files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other hard drives. ZFS is the only file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.